David Frum Biography

David Frum born David Jeffrey Frum is a Canadian-American Journalist, author and speechwriter.

David Frum Age

He was born on 30 June 1960 in Toronto, Canada. He is 58 years old as of 2018.

David Frum Family

He was born to a to a Jewish family, he is the son of the late Canadian journalist Barbara Frum and and the late Murray Frum, a dentist, who later became a real estate developer, philanthropist, and art collector. He has two siblings, Linda Frum, a member of the Senate of Canada and Matthew Frum.

David Frum Wife

He is married to Danielle Crittenden, the writer who is the stepdaughter of Peter Worthington, former Toronto Sun editor. The couple married in 1988. They together have three children.

David Frum photo

David Frum Education

He studied and graduated from the University of Toronto Schools in 1978 where he was the school captain. He then joined Yale University, where he earned Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees in history, there, he graduated in 1982. He earned his Juris Doctor (J.D.) at Harvard Law School in 1987.

David Frum Atlantic

He was a speechwriter for President George W. Bush, he authored the first book about the Bush presidency by former member of the Bush team. He is currently a senior editor at The Atlantic as well as an MSNBC contributor. He serves on the board of directors of the Republican Jewish Coalition, the anti-drug policy group Smart Approaches to Marijuana, the British think tank Policy Exchange, and as vice chairman and an associate fellow of the R Street Institute.

David Frum Book

The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush

Dead Right

Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again

An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror

How We Got Here: The 70’s–The Decade that Brought You Modern Life–For Better or Worse

What’s Right: The New Conservative Majority And The Remaking Of America

David Frum Net Worth

David Frum Twitter

David Frum Confronts Scaramucci on Maher: ‘You Helped Endanger’ the Country

David Frum Interview

David Frum: ‘The Truths of Politics Are Only Conditional’

Updated: 29 Aug 2018

Below is a digest of David Frum’s views, edited for length and clarity with permission from the Global Reporting Centre. During the course of the conversation, here is what Frum had to say…

On whether Americans are getting what they deserve with a Trump presidency:

“If you’ve ever looked at any of those fake news Facebook pages that the Russians planted, they are laughably unconvincing and they’re just obviously preposterous. The most circulated fake news story of the cycle was a story that purported to originate on what looked like a local TV station and it was a claim that the pope had endorsed Donald Trump. Now if you are Catholic enough to care about the Pope’s views on the election you are probably Catholic enough to know the Pope never endorses anybody. Never has, never will. It’s not a thing the pope does.

“[Those ads are not] there to fool people who are applying a modicum of consumer sensibility to their behaviour. Why did it work? It worked because it found ready targets. Why? Donald Trump was speaking to the worst things in people, cruelty, and yet found resonance. Why? Why was voter turnout so low? I’m a great believer in the importance of leadership and the responsibilities of leadership. But democracy does depend on the citizens. Democracy rests on the theory that you can trust people.”

“The reason I called my book Trumpocracy was I wanted to move our camera lens to widen it away from the personality of Donald Trump — dysfunctional and fascinating as he is — to the broader question of his power.

“Because look, there are all kinds of dysfunctional and aggressive and dishonest people on the North American continent and some of them are rich and some of them are famous. But what we had all believed was that American constitutional systems, modern party systems, exist to screen people like that away from power. And not just people like him but people like the Le Pen family in France. We had built these ways of governing that would keep such people away from power and those systems have been screening less and less and less well for the past 15 years or so.

“So the question I’m interested in is not who is Donald Trump and is he a bad person? I think that’s self-evident. The question is how is it that he’s president and how is [it] that he’s not contained?”

On Trump as uncontained kleptocrat:

“Donald Trump does not release his tax returns. The affairs of the family remain very murky. Donald Trump received streams of payments from his partners in the Trump Towers in Istanbul and in Manila and the United Arab Emirates and India. How much? We don’t know. Is it a little bit of his income or a lot of his income? We don’t know…. Does Donald Trump want to be an authoritarian figure? I mean he doesn’t like to be contradicted. But what he really wants to do is get rich. The problem is that his ambitions are in conflict with the legal order in the United States.

“[Trump has made] astonishing claims of legal impunity. He said ‘I can’t be indicted while I’m in office…. Also I can’t be guilty of obstruction of justice… never mind my motives. And finally, I have a hard power to pardon myself.’ You put those three things together and they all say, ‘I cannot in any way be punished for any crime I may commit.’”

On the Donald Trump who is trying to out-negotiate North Korean leader Kim Jong-un:

“The thing that helps us most understand what is going on in that summit has nothing to do with Korea. It’s Donald Trump’s purchase of the Plaza Hotel [in New York City] in 1988. Not only was he by far the highest bidder but he actually asked the person who was selling him the hotel to help him write his bid. His message was ‘I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m completely at your mercy. And I will pay whatever you ask.’ And he then paid $50 million or so more than anybody else. The purchase drove them into bankruptcy. It was eventually half a dozen years later sold at a price much lower than Donald Trump paid in 1989 and he then wrote a book about what a tremendous success he had with the Plaza Hotel. And that’s the guy. That’s the guy.

“What is happening now is that Donald Trump is giving the North Koreans what they want — a face-to-face meeting with the president, pictures of the North Korean and the U.S. flag. Just think of the propaganda value of that inside North Korea. And he’s giving it to them in exchange for really nothing at all.”

On the Donald Trump that bashed Canada and its PM after the June G7 summit in Quebec:

“[In Trump] we saw a deal maker calling out Canada for its trade rules on milk and basically insisting the United States is in this massive trade deficit, which it’s not. But he claimed it was and therefore all of the sanctions need to be imposed. That’s a pretty tough negotiator? Or is it a reckless negotiator? If you walk into the house and kick the dog, you’re not tough. Just what are you achieving?

“Donald Trump cannot do personal confrontation. The guy who’s famous for saying you’re fired can never fire anybody. So while he was there [in Quebec] he was sunshine itself. And [German Chancellor Angela Merkel] apparently made this very moving speech to him about ‘Think of all the things we’ve built together. Think of all we’ve done together. Look at the structure of peace and prosperity. Do any of our differences — even if they were real — amount to anything in comparison to that?’ And Trump, I’m told, said, ‘You know, you make good points.’ And then afterwards, when he was back in the safety of his plane on his Twitter box not having to talk to human beings, he lost it. And he didn’t make a deal. He has not gotten anything. What he’s got is an international crisis.”

On the scourge of ‘elderly politicians’:

“A dark joke: I think one of the things that explains a lot of what is happening in American politics right now is the consequences of the success of the campaign against smoking. It used to be that politicians would be active in their 40s and 50s and into their early 60s and then at 65 the cigarettes would remove them from the scene. Now, I plead with you, do not smoke. But it does expedite the renewal of people in government. Whereas now people linger. In the Republican world, so many people I see on television [defending Trump] who were all friends of mine, they’re in the grips of something…

“The Reagan and Thatcher revolutions have run their course. They did what they needed to do and their work is over. And we now face some new problems and we have these very elderly politicians who are applying out-of-date formulas and who are frightened of their own base and are failing tests.”